Dusty Rhodes, 1945 - 2015

All day I've been trying to think what I can possibly write about Dusty Rhodes.

Dusty Rhodes is dead. That still doesn't feel quite right. He was the American Dream. He was always just...there. Always Dusty. But he wasn't immortal, of course. Isn't that what he told us along? He was just a hard-working son of a plumber, he was just one of us. He was mortal.

I was too young to see Dusty's prime as it happened. I even missed the polkadot leotard in the WWF. For years my only real exposure to Dusty was as one of the voices of WCW, and I was very much a WWF kid. Even then, I had a fondness for the old guy that has persisted to this day – who doesn't enjoy imitating that lisping, jive-talking voice, “clubberin'”, “hitting him with a bicycle”, and “if you weeeell”? The first time I remember seeing Dusty Rhodes the wrestler was in ECW, during his feud with Steve Corino. A fan was born. Finally, I saw what millions had seen before me – Dusty Rhodes was a bad-ass, a fighter, and you wanted him to win.

I've often said that the biggest stars in wrestling are those that make themselves the most believable – the wrestlers who make people say, “I know wrestling's fake, but this guy, he's the real deal”. You believe Steve Austin was the toughest man in the WWF because he stared down Mike Tyson and didn't even blink. You believed CM Punk was an anti-establishment rebel because everything he did and said, in and out of the ring, suggested exactly that. You believed Goldberg could effortlessly beat anyone and everyone because he carried himself like he was capable of exactly that. You believed Ric Flair was the best wrestler in the world because, quite frankly, he told you so. And Dusty? You really believed that Dusty Rhodes was the working man, the son of a plumber, the working class hero fighting injustice, and fighting on the side of every single one of us. Something in Dusty spoke to the disenfranchised, the downtrodden and the dejected – for millions of people looking for a hero, he created one for them in himself.

If Dusty Rhodes' run in Jim Crockett Promotions, later WCW, or even just his groundbreaking feud with Ric Flair and the Four Horsemen, was his only legacy then we would still talk about him today as a bonafide legend of the sport. If Dusty Rhodes' legacy was only the “Hard Times” promo – undeniably one of the greatest promos in wrestling history – we would still talk about him as one of the most charismatic wrestlers the world has ever seen. Any wrestler in the world could be proud to leave those memories in their wake. But Rhodes' legacy was bigger. He influenced the wrestling business in ways that are still felt today, some that are so commonplace you can hardly imagine how we ever managed without them. He was talking people into buildings when for most wrestlers an interview was little more than a formality. As a booker, Dusty Rhodes coined concepts, pushed boundaries and presented the product in ways that have absolutely shaped wrestling as we know it.

If the measure of a man's legacy is in the effects he had on the lives of others, you only need to look to the tributes that have poured from the wrestling industries biggest and brightest stars these past two days. Dusty has been called a mentor, teacher and inspiration by everyone from Ric Flair to Triple H to Steve Austin to Paul Heyman to Kevin Owens and Sami Zayn. Across four decades, he taught, inspired and influenced some of the greatest wrestlers, greatest bookers, greatest talkers and greatest minds in the industry, and through his work with NXT and WWE's development system, that never stopped.

Dusty wasn't the biggest, wasn't the best looking and wasn't the best athlete. He was a mortal man, a working man, and he was one of us. He was ordinary. And we believed all that. And that's why we loved him.

On Being A Wrestling Fan

Wrestling fandom can be problematic, puzzling and downright infuriating on any number of levels. There's barely one person amongst us who hasn't had to put up with years of what John Stossell called “the standard question” - “it's all fake, right?”, with the smug sense of superiority – and of utterly missing the point – that carries along with it. There's the initial breakthrough so many of us have shared of realising that there's more to wrestling than what the TV feeds us – whether that's the behind the scenes gossip, or the offerings of promotions well outside of the WWE monopoly – being tainted when we realise how much of the internet wrestling “community” we were once so excited to enter into is full of bickering, bigoted man-children clinging to opinions that might have meant something ten years ago. There's the drunk, rowdy, or just plain obnoxious fans who seem hell-bent on spoiling your live experience by shouting homophobic or sexist slurs at performers.

And, right at the base of it all, there's a sense of entitlement. That's hardly unique to wrestling, but it seems to manifest itself more openly, and carries with it a decades-old language and set of codes and conventions that probably seen entirely baffling to an outside observer.

In essence, we're always told that there are two ways you can be a wrestling fan. You can be a mark – the mindless mook who believes that the product they're watching is legitimate – or a smart mark or “smark” - the fan who knows the score, they not only know that the results are predetermined, but they know the names of the writers making those decisions, and the backstage politics that influence them. Increasingly, as the distinction of “mark” becomes more and more meaningless as anything more than a childish insult, the derision once levelled at the clueless mark is directed at a new victim, the “casual fan”. The casual fan is a hypothetical entity – maybe they were a wrestling fan twenty years ago, maybe they're a first-time viewer  flicking through the channels and stumbling on a wrestling show he wouldn't ordinarily watch, or maybe it's the kid who's hooked because John Cena is his hero, but who's still fickle enough to give it up in an instant the moment he's distracted by bright colours and flashing lights. Whoever the casual fan is, they are assumed to be the antithesis of the “smart” fan, who wants wrestling to be suited entirely to their needs.

There's a positive angle to all this too - the "smart" fan can approach wrestling with all the attention and analysis of any cultural critic; with no academic framework to work within, they're a fanbase that studies the text of every match, every angle, every performer, studying, critiquing and deconstructing every match, every decision, every minute gesture and every carefully selected turn of phrase for deeper meaning, looking for clues to future events, callbacks to the past, or references to "insider" gossip, or else debating where the line is drawn between the reality of the performance and the "fake" of wrestling - an entire culture has grown up amongst wrestling fans online obsessed with uncovering "botches", or moments in the performance where a wrestler slips up, whether that be failing to perform a move correctly, saying the wrong thing in a promo, or an increasing number of other definitions. The smart fan is, above all, a critic.

Returning to my earlier point, though, the opinions of critics are there, at best, to inform and to educate us. They are not there to talk down to fans who may have been watching for less time, or less intently. They are certainly not there to present their opinion as fact, and to belittle those with different views, or who simply don't care about aspects of wrestling beyond the on-screen product. In all honesty, that attitude enrages me. You can enjoy wrestling on any number of levels, and that's the beauty of it, but no one person's enjoyment or interpretation is more important than another. If you've been watching every wrestling promotion under the sun for the past thirty years, and you're watching Wrestlemania decked out in NJPW merchandise, you have invested the exact same amount of time and money into that experience as a new fan watching for the first time ever. What you think of it, and what you take away from it, carry no more weight from what they take away from it.


And you know what? The “smarter” a fan you think you are, the more of a mark you are. It's the “smart” fans that invest more of their time and money into wrestling than anybody else, more than the smiling kid in the John Cena t-shirt, all while acting as if they're above it all. You know the script, so when you're forking out $9.99 for the WWE Network, and $25 for your brand new Dean Ambrose T-shirt – because only marks buy the John Cena merch – you're oiling the gears of the corporate machine far more than the kids, marks and “casuals” you resent so much. That's why wrestling throws you a bone every now and then.

If wrestling doesn't hook you with one trick, they hook you with the next. The difference is that the mark or, in modern parlance, the “casual fan”, is happy to be taken along for the ride, while the smarks will argue to the death that they haven't been hooked.

Who remembers #hijackRAW? A bunch of self-important, entitled smarks staging an anti-WWE protest that amounted to...what? Buying tickets to a WWE show, and once they were there, chanting for the good guys and booing the bad guys. Some act of rebellion that was. Hook, line and sinker.